Bridging Radiomics to Tumor Immune Microenvironment Assessment in Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma

Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is a common cancer and could result in poor prognosis. Understanding individual tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) in ccRCC patients may predict prognosis and response to therapy. In this work, we explore the concept of using radiomic features extracted from computer tomography (CT) imaging to correlate the TIME measurements from multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) analysis. Since CT imaging has long been the standard for evaluation of RCCs, it has the potential to provide non-invasive approximations of the tissue-based mIHC biomarkers. We selected two biomarkers that were grounded by clinical research: PD-L1 expression and CD8(+)PD-1(+) T cell to CD8(+) T cell ratio of the tumor epithelium. Then we extracted these two markers from a preliminary set of 52 patients using automated mIHC analysis. We used Random Forest, AdaBoost and ElasticNet to classify each sample as either expressing high or low levels of these markers. We found the radiomic features can correlate tumor epithelium PD-L1 >5%, PD-L1 >10%, and CD8(+)PD1(+)/CD8(+) >37% with AUROC 0.75, 0.85 and 0.71, respectively.

Automated summary

This study investigates the correlation between radiomic features extracted from CT imaging and tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) measurements from multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) analysis. The findings show a significant correlation between these radiomic features and the levels of PD-L1 expression and CD8(+)PD-1(+) T cell to CD8(+) T cell ratio.